With the emerging scenario of increasing penetration of ‘Electric Vehicles’ in the automobile sector and higher dependence on alternate renewable sources of energy, it is expected that the demand for conventional fuels like gasoline and diesel are bound to decrease. In such scenario, the refiners need to adopt novel technologies to change the product slate from conventional fuels into chemicals or petrochemical feedstocks produced from crude oil. Considering these, it is desired to have technologies and process schemes which can help in achieving the said objective of crude oil to chemical conversion.
U.S. Pat. No. US 2013/0292299 describes an integrated ebullated bed and hydrotreater for whole crude oil upgrading. The crude oil is first flashed into lighter components which are sent for hydrotreating in a fixed bed hydrotreater unit. The heavy atmospheric residue is hydrotreated in an ebullated bed hydrotreater reactor. Distillates from the hydrotreater and unconverted residue from ebullated bed reactions are combined to form a synthetic crude oil stream.
WO 2014/062465 describes a process for high severity catalytic cracking of crude oil. The crude oil is separated into high boiling fraction and low boiling fraction and are separately processed in two downer type of reactors. The deactivated catalyst from both vessels is regenerated in a common regenerator vessel.
U.S. Pat. No. US 2015/0321975 provides a process for producing aromatics from a hydrocarbon source in the presence of supercritical water. Supercritical water is used as an alternate to catalysts, which are not stable at these conditions. The dominant source of BTX aromatics are heavy aromatic compounds with single aromatic core with alkyl side chains.
U.S Pat. No. US 2013/0197284 describes an integrated hydrotreating, solvent deasphalting and steam pyrolysis process for complete conversion of crude oil. Here, crude oil after pretreatment is sent to hydrotreater and thereafter processed in solvent deasphalting unit. Deasphalter unit products are thermally converted in a steam Pyrolysis process.
U.S. Pat. No. US 2016/0122668 describes an integrated slurry hydroprocessing and steam Pyrolysis process for production of olefins and aromatic petrochemical feedstocks from crude oil feedstock. Crude oil is hydroprocessed to produce an effluent rich in hydrogen content and the said effluent is then routed to steam Pyrolysis unit to cause thermal cracking reactions. Mixed product stream is separated and the olefins and aromatic products are recovered.